People

Christine Archer was a founder member of Wasafiri and of ATCAL having a degree in African and Caribbean Studies from the University of Kent. Coming from a background in education as a teacher, education advisor and trainer in diversity management, Christine now runs The Faraday Partnership and works…

Kate Arthurs is director of strategy for the British Council’s global arts programme. She previously ran her own company managing cultural and artistic projects, including partnership between London Book Fair and British Council to shape an annual programme of international writing in India, China a…

Alison Donnell is Professor of Modern Literatures in English at the University of Reading, UK. She has published widely on Caribbean and black British writings, including a book-length revision of literary history: Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary Histo…

Rachel Holmes is the author of Eleanor Marx: A Life, serialised on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, winner of a 2015 Gladstone’s Library Writer-in-Residence Prize and shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize. She is also the author of The Hottentot Venus: The life and death of Saartjie Baartman and T…

Aamer Hussein was born in Karachi, Pakistan and moved to Britain in 1970. His first collection of short stories, Mirror to the Sun, was published in 1993. Since then he has produced several other collections: This Other Salt (1999), Turquoise (2002), Insomnia (2007), and a novella, Another Gulmohar…

Tessa McWatt is a novelist, screenwriter and librettist. She is the author of six novels and a novella for young adults. Her second novel, Dragons Cry, was shortlisted for the City of Toronto Book Awards and the Governor General Awards of Canada. Her other novels include This Body, Step Closer, and …

Bhavit Mehta has worked as a publisher, translator and festival director. He studied Biological Sciences and worked in a research environment at UCL before entering the world of children’s books in 2009, writing and publishing tales from India under his own imprint Saadhak Books. Between 2010 and 20…

Martin Soames is a litigation solicitor with a publishing background. He has been involved in a number of cases which raise significant freedom of speech issues. Before training as a lawyer he worked in book publishing in various roles including blurb writer, production assistant, and finally as a c…

Rehana Ahmed is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Her research and teaching interests are in British Asian, black British, Muslim and South Asian writing, and her recent work has explored contemporary literary representations of multicult…

Dean Atta is a poet from London, UK. His debut collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, published by the Westbourne Press, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. He was named as one of the most influential LGBT people in the UK by the Independent on Sunday Pink List and featured in Out News Globa…

Brian Chikwava joined the Wasafiri Advisory Board in 2011. He is a past Caine Prize winner and author of Harare North (Jonathan Cape 2009). He tutors at City University London and is a past Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He has also held fellowships at Santa Maddalena Foundati…

Rachael Gilmour is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Much of her research focuses on issues of language, translation, and linguistic encounter in colonial and postcolonial contexts from 18th- and 19th-century South Africa to contemporary multilingual Britain. He…

Stephanie Jones is a lecturer at the University of Southampton where she teaches maritime and postcolonial literatures and works more broadly in the field of Indian Ocean studies, and the inter-discipline of law and literature. She has published on literatures from East Africa and the South Asian di…

Tabish Khair was educated mostly in Bihar, India. After working as a journalist for The Times of India in Delhi, he joined academia in Denmark via the usual immigrant process of washing dishes, painting houses etc. His publications include the studies, Babu Fictions (2001) and The Gothic, Postcoloni…

Hannah Lowe’s first poetry collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection and was short-listed for the Forward, Aldeburgh and Seamus Heaney Best First Collection Prizes. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. She has al…

Nick Makoha was Shortlisted for the 2017 Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection for his debut poetry collection Kingdom of Gravity. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow and Complete Works Alumni. He won the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry prize and is the 2016 winner of the Toi Derricot…

Zoe Norridge is a Lecturer in English and Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her research currently focuses on cultural responses to genocide in Rwanda. In April 2014 she curated the exhibition “Rwanda in Photographs: Death Then, Life Now” for the twentieth commemoration with Mark Seal…

Nikesh Shukla’s debut novel, Coconut Unlimited, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2010. Alongside his second novel, Meatspace, Nikesh has written for The Guardian, Esquire, Buzzfeed, Vice and BBC2, LitHub, Guernica and BBC Radio 4. Nikesh is also the editor the bestselling essay collec…

Janet Steel. Programme Manager Commonwealth Writers, the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation. Prior to this post Janet spent over thirty years working in the cultural sector, primarily in theatre and new writing. Starting out as a young actress Janet quickly moved into directing, prod…

Melanie Abrahams is the founder of the companies renaissance one and Tilt. She mentors emerging producers and lectures widely. She was the curator of Modern Love, a project exploring love and modern relationships which was nominated for an EMMA Award for Best Theatre/Play. She has collaborated with…

Ashok Bery is Senior Lecturer in English at the London Metropolitan University where he teaches Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Twentieth-Century British and American Poetry, Romantic Poetry and Poetic Forms and Genres. In 2000 he published Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations (edite…

Margaret Busby OBE became the UK’s youngest and first black female publisher when she co-founded Allison & Busby Ltd, of which she was editorial director for 20 years. She was subsequently editorial director of Earthscan Publications. She is an award-winning writer, editor, critic, consultant an…

Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta and has published several prize winning novels as well as works of literary criticism.His work frequently appears in well known journals across the globe. His most recent publications include a collection of essays, Clearing A Space: Reflections on India, Literatu…

David Dabydeen is a writer, critic and historian who first became known for his prize-winning collection of Creole poems, Slave Song (1984). His first novel, The Intended, was published in 1991 followed by Disappearance (1993) and The Counting House (1996). A Harlot’s Progress (1999) continued Dabyd…

Bernardine Evaristo MBE was born in London to a Nigerian father and English mother. Her six books include Hello Mum (2010), a novella written in the voice of a teenage boy, Lara, a verse novel based on her family history spanning England, Nigeria, Ireland, Germany and Brazil (republished with new ma…

Robert Fraser is the author of several monographs, including studies of Sir James Frazer, Proust, Victorian quest literature and postcolonial fiction. His critical portrait of Ben Okri, Towards the Invisible City (2002), was described in Wasafiri as ‘poetic psychobiography’ and The Chameleon Poet (2…

Maggie Gee joined the Wasafiri Advisory Board in 2004. She is the writer of eleven novels, a collection of short stories, The Blue, and a memoir, My Animal Life (2010). Born in Poole, Dorset, she was one of the original 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. Her seventh novel The White Family (2002)…

Romesh Gunesekera grew up in Sri Lanka and the Phillipines before moving to England in 1971. He is the author of various novels and short stories. After the 1992 appearance of his first novel Monkfish Moon, he went on to publish Reef (1994) which was shortlisted for the Booker and The Sandglass (199…

Abdulrazak Gurnah has contributed to the development of Wasafiri from the beginning, working as a contributing editor since 1987. Born in Zanzibar, he left in the late 1960s and migrated to Britain. His first novel Memory of Departure, was published in 1987 and was quickly followed by Pilgrim’s Way…

Lyn Innes is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent, Canterbury. Born and educated in Australia, she moved to North America and developed her interest in cultural nationalism, focusing on Irish, African, African American and Caribbean literatures. At the University…

Maya Jaggi was formerly Literary Editor of Third World Quarterly. She is a well known and highly respected feature writer and lead reviewer on international literature for The Guardian. She has written widely for publications including the TLS, The Observer, Financial Times and Index on Censorship a…

Louis James is now Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent, Canterbury. In the 1960s he taught at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and published widely in the fields of Victorian, Modern and Caribbean literature. His publications include Jean Rhys (1978), Fiction for the Working Man…

David Johnson is senior lecturer at the Open University in English Literature. His publications include Shakespeare and South Africa (1996), Jurisprudence: A South African Perspective (principal author, 2001), A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English (co-editor, 2005) and Twenti…

Mimi Khalvati was born in Tehran, Iran, grew up on the Isle of Wight and went to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Having worked both as an actor and director in Britain and Iran, Khalvati founded Matrix, a women’s experimental theatre group and was co-founder of Theatre in Exile. Mimi Kha…

Gary McKeone was Literature Director at Arts Council England from 1995-2006. Before that he worked with Field Day Theatre Company in Ireland and at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. He is currently Chair of the Poetry Archive and the recently created Poetry Translation Centre and is al…

Denise DeCaires Narain is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex and has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing. Her book, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Writing: Making Style was published in 2001 and she is currently working on a monograph on the Jamaican…

Alastair Niven OBE is Principal of Cumberland Lodge, Windsor and was President of English PEN from 2003 to 2007. He was former director of literature at the Arts Council of Great Britain (latterly the Arts Council of England) and the British Council. Currently chair of the Commonwealth Writers’ Priz…

Michael Ondaatje is a writer and poet, best known for his Booker Prize winning novel, The English Patient (1992), which became an Oscar winning film in 1996, directed by Anthony Minghella. His other prose works include The Collected Words of Billy the Kid (1970), Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Run…

Caryl Phillips is an internationally acclaimed writer whose work includes novels, television documentaries, and screenplays such as the adaptation of VS Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur, for which he won the Silver Ombu for best screenplay at the Mar Del Plata Film Festival. His many novels include The…

Minoli Salgado is a writer and academic who teaches English literature at the University of Sussex. Born in Malaysia, raised in Sri Lanka and South East Asia and educated mainly in England, she has published widely on migrant studies and diasporic literature. She is the author of Writing Sri Lanka:…

Sukhdev Sandhu joined Wasafiri’s Board in 2004 when he edited the highly regarded ‘Focus on Film’ issue (Winter 2004). Sandhu gained his doctorate from Oxford University and teaches at New York University. An award-winning film critic for the Telegraph, he also writes for London Review of Books, New…

Ngugi wa Thiong’o is one of Kenya’s best known novelists and activists who campaigns for ‘cultural decolonisation’ in Africa’s educational institutions and the promotion of African languages — the subject of many of his essays including those that appear in Decolonising the Mind (1986) and Moving th…

Marina Warner CBE is an eminent and prolific cultural critic and writer. Her non-fiction publications include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), which won the Fawcett Book Prize, Signs and Wonders: Ess…

Karen McCarthy Woolf writes poetry, prose and radio drama. She is the editor of Bittersweet: Black Women’s Contemporary Poetry (1998) and Kin: New Fiction by Black and Asian Women (2004), both of which went on to form the basis of two nationwide tours. Her writing is published in numerous magazines…